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Tuesday, December 22

Happiness is contaminating. Or, at least in Asghar Farhadi's movie, transmitted like some exotic disease. Women, garrulous and chirping like sparrows, make the perfect medium. They are young, educated, modern in the way they dress, confident in marital matters. They make the world spin around with their lies. What's not to love when they come out the most beautiful pairs of lips?

The talented director of A Separation and The Past is trying his hand at secrecy in a story tangled with little bends in the truth. We have three married couples, three small children and two single people. One of the wives, Sepideh plays the matchmaker for Elly, her daughter's nursery teacher. She wants to marry her off to Ahmed, recently divorced and returned from Germany. They go away for the weekend and end up by the seaside. After the first night -full of joyful remarks and innuendos at the potential couple- Elly wants to leave. Sepideh argues against her early departure and left to watch over the kids, Elly disappears. The story makes a good excuse to study guilt, blame and group crisis. The initial joy and easiness crumble and the friends turn against each other. A mere remark, a joke, an innocent avoiding of the truth lead to an escalating disaster. The story peels off like an onion of many layers under the eyes of the viewer and the skillful director who spins off both narrative and characters. We stand witness to the changing moods, confessions and events. We are taught the potential danger behind a white lie and how it can affect and alter reality and lives. As the tension grows, fissures are found in the people and their version of the truth. Cloudy weather, rain, wind, menacing water all contribute to the tension, building it against the initial state of happiness. What catches the eye is the idea of miscommunication and how we have a tendency to lose ourselves amid the crowds, may these be as familiar as possible. We fail to connect to others and wrap ourselves in comforting layers of lies or unearthed truths that cover the rawness of the selves. The movie is also depictive in the peculiar struggle of modern ways and Islam traditions: the unsaid truths, the status of women, the appearance versus truth dichotomy. It is a snippet of Iranian life as it unfolds between duplicity and uncertainty. The way we fabricate truth appears to be universal, inlaid inside our very human nature. As usual, the road to hell is paved with the very best intentions.

Saturday, December 12

Fates and Furies is dissecting marriage, both sides of the coin: his and hers. The story's catch comes from the feast of language, the mythological references and the fluidity of the narrative. Lauren Groff has a certain nonchalance about seizing things with the eyes of her mind and then putting them on paper. Her easiness with language and the nuances of things she peels off both people and tales, make her writing layers softly addictive. Once your eyes grow accustomed to her dancing letters, words begin to haunt you in a repetitive manner. Her books makes by far, the best book of best lines there is.

All you have to do is write the best sentence you've ever written. Then 10,000 more of the best. Then find a way to string them together into the story of something.

Lotto, the husband, has his story written under the auspices of Fates, whereas Mathilde's account of marriage comes to alter the reader's perception with her Furies. We shift angles and points of view in an attempt to answer some important question: Is this how we live along people, not truly knowing their innermost thoughts and feelings, their hidden paradoxes, their tormented inner monologues or does this stand for a peculiar marriage? The truth lies on both sides, mostly, in-between the commonalities. We make unbearable beings to ourselves and most of the times, impossible to tolerate by those close to us. It brings me back to Julian Barnes and his belief about the militant and the moderate in every marriage. Switching roles on a constant basis is the very essence of every relationship's liveliness. We either do it or bury ourselves under the treacherous founding of this institution. Add children to the mix and it is the perfect recipe for failure.

Lotto and Mathilde have no kids, few responsibilities and the freedom to make mistakes. In their close to perfect relationship, one remembers the good, the glamorous, the exciting side of life and marriage, whereas the other has a story of struggle, frustration and aching to match it all. It makes one wonder about the success of their relationship, at least in the eyes of the others. Would Lotto's egocentric nature have survived and thrived, had it not been for Mathilde to pick up the pieces and readjust, rewrite, reshape, redecorate the entire edifice of them? Is this the ultimate proof of love, the need to relinquish one's true self to build the other? It takes strength and resilience and much patience. It is not designed for everyone. Lotto's genius is meant to live on and weave its path with Mathilde one more time to deliver her from the dark and to reinforce the conviction that in our attempt to build others, we build ourselves.

As for the book, Fates and Furies met right where I was. It is how such books come across and how they are bound to stay in your mind. It spoke my kind of language, revealed itself unexpected and raw, like a warm wound that grows into a limb, a necessary part of you. I live organically inside my books and then, as I move one, I leave myself there, only to reclaim me later. Later on, the book shall read differently as I am bound to be a different reader. Meanwhile, there is much drama in steady seas, as the author herself put it.

Sunday, November 29

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is a labor of love. It is about
how the reader ends up loving a dysfunctional, drifting man, promiscuous,
abusive, with a strange sense of humor, always in search of illegal money.
Denis Johnson has the boldness to ask the reader to validate such a character
because there is so much love that resides at the very nature of him. If you
put love into your craft, it shows in the language, the story, the people, and
the cracks. In a word, beauty transcends the obvious flaws in the character's
humane doings and mirrors back into the one holding the book:

This boat was pulling behind itself a tremendous triangular kite on a rope.
From the kite, up in the air a hundred feet or so, a woman was suspended,
belted in somehow, I would have guessed. She had long red hair. She was
delicate and white, and naked except for her beautiful hair.

This is from Work,
a short story where two men tear down an abandoned house, pulling at the wires,
breaking the wooden walls, tired, sweaty and hungry for a quick buck. Outside
the window, such vision works as a madeleine to the narrator,
and later on, as Wayne admits it his house he is dismantling, they meet his
former wife. It seems to be the same red-haired beauty gliding over the river but
Wayne denies it so the narrator concludes he softly must have stepped into his
friend's dream. One man's dreams are but another's trigger of nostalgia. All
women who ever embraced, loved, hated or left him come queuing in his mind: ''Where
are all my women now, with their sweet wet words and way, and the miraculous
balls of hail popping a green translucence in the yards?''The imagery of such a
memory, the way it sneaks up on the narrator, soft as a summer breeze, aching
like an old wound, then pours out into such vivid words, makes the world
spins less in slow motion. The narrator stays on one side of it and then this
snippet of life stretches way back to you, on the other side. into your very
world. You have been touched.

Some writers stand poets in disguise
and Denis Johnson is among them. His prose is unadorned, direct, undressed of
any artifice or pretense, yet his very essence and ability to see the hidden
face of things and people alike penetrate the bare accounts and glitters. His
economy of words reminds one of Hemingway or Carver, Johnson’s
teacher, yet there is a new layer added to every sequence, rendering it into a
unique piece of poetry. These stories of the fallen reminded me of Lucia
Berlin’s women who stand at the very end of society, flawed and disallowed,
yet making significant human beings.

Denis Johnson called his work ‘a
zoo of wild utterances’ thus pointing to the variety of human being walking
the very perimeter of his mind. Such characters are bound to breathe in the
very metaphor of life as it filters through the mind and heart of their maker.
In Dundun, another remarkable little charm, the soy crop is depicted as ‘the
failed, wilted cornstalks…laid out on the ground like rows of underthings’.
In another, a country fair looks back at the world ‘with sad resignation…bare
its breasts.’ It honestly makes you crave for the touch of such places,
such a man, such words engulfing the very edge of your senses.

Saturday, November 21

I dream in books and live inside them for a significant part of my days, unaware at times where reality and fiction cease to draw a defining line. Such habit turns into an unexpected pleasure whenever I pick the right book. All books are lovable and worth my time, but some of them are hard to part from- A manual for cleaning women by Lucia Berlin would stand out in any remarkable pile. It is close to perfection in style, simplicity, choice of words or genuineness.

Lucia Berlin is called one of America's best kept secrets. She spent her life writing and living, never acquiring much fame, doing menial jobs that inspired her to write wonderfully. She had to face health problems and she managed to do so elegantly, drawing upon each of her experiences to recreate a snippet of life in her stories. She loved, she mothered, she read, she lived. Looking at her in the sepia-toned photos, I find her coy, dainty, simple. Still, she had so much life inside that one cannot read her work and not feel alive. So many lives are captured and rendered beautifully worthy in her pages that after reading her work, I could add that she loved people. Tremendously.

A manual for cleaning women is a collection of stories that read like John Cheever, Raymond, Carver, or Grace Paley. There is such love for small people, living dangerously or in great simplicity, depending on how you choose to see their lives. She was one of them so there is a shred of personal sensitivity in every page. She was a mother of four, divorced, alcoholic, cleaning rich people's houses herself. She knows that behind failures and addictions, there is poetry revealed in a reckless manner. You get a peak into the lives filled with of alcohol, drug use, abortions, loneliness, disease, alienation. Still, you feel close to the characters because she feels so familiar with them, so intimate in depicting their lives or her own that every little aspect seems easy and natural. At times, the stories read like a memoir, a detailed accounting of a life spent in different places, alongside wounded people. Mining towns, coin laundries, hospitals, Mexico, hotels, emergency rooms all become unsurprising locations for her stories filled with compassion, wittiness and love.

Lucia Berlin's stories carry more weight than you would expect, more spunk than one would hope for. They flow into the reader, fill in the crevasses and exult into the clear need to be read again. They get a grip on you and hold you inside with their realism, beauty and grace. They are stories meant to haunt you in good and bad times with their engrossing power.

Saturday, October 31

Marysela Zamora is a beautiful, talented woman whom I met last year during a mutual fellowship in US. She is a journalist, a movie maker, and a civil society supporter in her interest to connect social media and digital resources and the people. She also writes poetry and blogs here: http://elblogdemarama.ticoblogger.com. During the orientation week, 50 people or so from all over the world had to mingle and make friends. In the middle of such a lovely crowd, we had to find people of similar experience and interests. Without any explanation, we found each other sharing about our mutual passions: writing, reading, movies, blogging, among other things. Four months later, we got reunited on a night cruise down the Potomac River, full of stories and already missing Boise and San Antonio.

Any Other Day, directed by my friend Marysela Zamora, is a short movie that captures the very idea of innocence. In a world that grows chaotically apart, where genuine feelings and emotions are filtered through different media channels that amputate the human spirit, two children live for the excitement of being alive. In the middle of nature, surrounded by long lost sounds and sensations, Fabiana and Sebastian embark on a new adventure every day. On this day, as usual as any other, they go into the wilderness to find Tutti's mother. Tutti is a bird Fabiana keeps in her tree house and whom Sebastian sees as the orphan in need of a mother. By the river, Fabiana starts playing among the stones, while Sebastian goes looking for any sign of childless bird. Time flows slowly, rain comes after sun, earth breathes along life, children dwell in their silences. When the quiet becomes too intense, they turn into roaring wolf-children, shouting their lungs out at all surrounding things. Tired, they spend moments on a row on the porch and before parting, they decide upon the part they are to play on the following day. They might be taking turns or Sebastian simply wants to be graceful and has the girl pick the word of the day: Superheros!

Cualquier Dia flows like a breath of fresh air, softly getting you inside the story. You marvel at the scenery, at the slowness of such a simple and rewarding existence, as if taking a peek into some long-lost paradise. The children's faces and movements speak more than their own voices: they are pure, unaltered by outside perils and temptations. They live to play alongside nature and you get this feeling of balance and unspoiled heaven. Yet, at the back of pretty images, civilization slowly crawls into this least explored place - a piece of cardboard, a cap, a modern word. Fabiana nurtures Tutti and tells it stories -a Little Red Riding Hood innocent version of how the hunter chased way the wolf which ran and ran and never returned to grandma's house. No dark side, a nice tale for a nice birdie. Yet, there is a scene in the movie where Fabiana burries something- we are left to guess. Is it Tutti that left the secured space inside Sebastian's cap and flew into danger? Is simply a child's play in the mud? It might be a grown-up's way of seeing or assuming danger when it is not even visible. Experience or lack of blind faith make the viewer somehow wary about how things unfold.

The movie made me think of the mysterious vanishing of Pobby and Dingan, a novel by Ben Rice in terms of innocence and make believe, the ardent need to feel that there is hope and candor in people and places. Also, there is a trace of a Momo, character in the book Mr. Ibrahim and the flowers of the Coran, breaking free from the prison of different institutions and beliefs, of tales we are told and stories we build inside and outside ourselves to survive. Fabiana and Sebastian make their own little world, following their own little rituals and habits, games and pretense. The movie is either to be seen as a rite of passage or as the unseen pressure and ugly breath of the outside world, the mighty civilization that is bound to flaw and sour both Fabiana and Sebastian and their secluded little paradise. It is perhaps our own inner struggle to preserve any shred of authenticity against the uniformity of an outsiderness that strives to turn us into conventional beings. It is our little way of making our own pretty happy thespian ending to a rather heartless, cruel Grimmslike version of life. Either way, Any Other Day will give you a suspended moment of pondering upon the two-sided beauty of life. As for Marysela Zamora, I am certain her name is bound to stay with us in the challenging, expressive display of her talent.

Sunday, October 11

Paul Haggis's Third person is a movie that purposefully intends to reveal nothing by pointing to everything. White roses, a flying note, a bike, a painting, a line are recurring liaison moments that puncture the multi-stranded narrative. It is leading the viewer towards some great denouement only to leave him puzzled.

Third person feels as if Paul Haggis had three movie ideas in his mind but got too lazy to spin off each separately so he went for this unfortunate melange. It remotely reminded me of other films of the same structure and similar stories that had the same hard time selling, talking, walking themselves into the minds of the viewer: 360, Hereafter or Movie 43. It has some clear ideas in mind about fate, betrayal, loss or pain, yet it fails to render the stories fluid as if they wanted to keep rewriting themselves constantly.

The writer, rich and a Pulitzer winner (Liam Neeson) leaves his wife (Kim Basinger) to go to Paris and write his next book. His protégé and lover, young journalist Anna (Olivia Wilde) joins him for a passionate and chaotic affair. In the next story set in Rome, a sleazy business man named Sean (Adrien Brody) falls for a Romanian gypsy girl with an agenda to rip him off the money she needs to save her eight-year-old daughter from the hands of a trafficker. Back in New York, an instable former actress (Mila Kunis) is fighting her artist ex-husband (James Franco) for the custody of their eight-year-old boy. Children or parents are the objects of aching in this movie, rather in their absence, death or alleged existence or in the way they inflict pain on their offsprings. White roses are a pledge of beauty rather than a sign of trust. They fail to express the sincerity of the sender and mirror back on his own lack of trust in his own abilities and the people in his life, There are also some lines in the movie that synthesize some of the main ideas of the movie: “It’s supposed to be about a man who can only feel through the characters he creates.” (the writer tells his editor), “You have random characters making various excuses for your life,” (the latter complains to the former) “Women have the gift of being able to deny any reality.”

It is interesting how the movie suggests that writers are not only disturbed but also vain and lacking any principles. The writer in this movie copies down every bit of conversation he has, gets inspired by his girlfriend's misery and makes his latest novel a hit by revealing the raw, painful truths in his life and the life of others. Is this a way of unfolding bad emotions and shaking off trauma? Does the attire of writing make the writer invisible or grant him the right to stand above others? It makes you wonder about the price one pays to win at all costs or about the fact that every act of creation merely relies on destruction. It is also frustrating how all the men in this movie crave to be in control and how all female characters lack drive and strength.

In Havana, Robert Redford, the gambler, tells Lena Olin, "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds." This comes out as an attractive piece of truths on the lips of the seductive man, yet it bears little scientific proof. The idea of the butterfly effect as it is perceived by the pop culture -a single occurrence, no matter how small, can change the course of the universe forever - insinuates itself in the layers of the movie, suggesting a kind of boomerang effect in the way relationships get shattered. Every time a third person comes along, the initial balance is disrupted, suggesting a kind of fatalistic approach to the misfortunes and accidents of life. Nevertheless, despite the range of actors and some good performances, Third person reads itself like the 50 cent coin that the writer drops in the sparkling water glass -it stirs a bubble or two but it never rises above water, rather ebb flowing in its little glass-like universe.

Wednesday, September 16

Both question and answer come right away at the beginning of this novel -What is the measure of love? We come to appreciate both love and the one we love when it is gone. And the best way to exorcise these demons is to write about it -in detailed, microscopic thoroughness about the story, the outcome, the turmoil and the redemption. Actually the book leaves an open ending so you could pick a side or choose a battle: give the love story a second chance or help the two protagonists come to terms with themselves and move on.

As she once confessed, Jeanette Winterson is in love with language above all. The story, the plot, the narrative are merely a pretext to play with words and ignite a striking imagery of the feelings, emotions, thoughts and gestures. I believe she is more infatuated with words and their mechanics rather than a person, with the way words shine upon the loved one and spins around the story to become an immortal one. This woman is drunk on love as it paints itself in and out of the words. Her character falls in love with a married woman, Louise, breaks the heart of another, then leaves the red-haired spouse because she has cancer and Elgin, her husband, seems to hold the right key and answers to curing her. So far, this sounds terribly romantic but we often end up doing the wrong things in the name of love. Louise is left heart-broken once the main character flees the grounds and exiles herself into a place of coldness. In the middle of nowhere, she bleeds love through her pores and turns her heart inside out in search for answers and a solution to put Louise out of her mind. The agonizing process is beautifully worded, brushing an aching painting of love lost and the way we torture ourselves in the name of love. It turns Louise and the love affair into a unique thing, a passion that makes the narrator recollect past affairs only to point at the greatness of this one and to aggrandize both suffering and romance.

The most interesting and devastating part of the book is when she dismantles Louise into body parts and organs, singing them all and stating her love for each little inch of this woman. It is passionate, sexual, frenetic, almost making your mouth water at the richness of the depiction. It keeps the reader wondering whether such detail is specific to women writers or whether men have the patience to observe such intricate pattern in love and the person next to them. It brings into my mind Orhan Pamuk's novel The Museum of innocence where the writer mourns lost love and spends the rest of his life gathering proofs of his unique love and chasing the woman he loved, yet never managed to keep, all over the world. Still Pamuk does not analyze and split hairs in four, rather has a more evocative, nostalgic approach to his suffering. Men seem to be more inclined to quantify the meaning of love in parts and bits, measuring it against very palpable proofs, whereas women dwelve on the things left hanging, the unspoken, the uttered questions, the impossible answers, the touches, the geography of the loved body and the smell of familiar territory.

This book is also about jealousy and cruelty, rejection and despise. Love is easily turned into a multitude of other feelings, embracing the shades of other stances. In every great or minor affair, feelings reach a peak then slowly descend into a linear status quo or degenerate into other negative emotions. Elgin goes from comfort love to an acute sense of possession and then to malice; whether his new relationship is meant to bring him acceptance of the previous and a new start remains a mystery. On the other hand, our narrator climbs the peaks of insanity and despair only to come back a wounded, broken being. Louise returns and time takes a halt. The story that was, closes its circle and we are left to choose a new beginning or a lesson learnt at the expense of some broken hearts. It is up to us to decide. As in love, choice stands written in our bodies. Anatomically speaking, we are bound to live past the skin!

Thursday, August 27

I love The Paris Review, the feeling of immersion into good interviews, where writers are peeled off their layers until raw essence is verbalized. I peruse it for the language, the titles, the revealing dialogues, the inspiration for reading, which equals, most of the times, the unexpectedly pleasant discovery of new writers. Dorthe Nors is one of such moments of serendipity and Karate Chop is among the best borrowed books I read in US.

A karate chop slices the sealed air and delivers a slanting stroke of the hand against an object, a person, a limb, a heart, a row of words, a life, some accumulating fear or the invisible face of the reader. This is how it feels when you read Dorthe Nors- hard-hitting, condensed sequences of ordinary life captured in a volume of 15 stories that hits you hard. They have inducing titles and unexpected endings, snippets of random existences shadowed by fear. Fifteen stories in 82 pages may be short, yet they are vivid and dark-humored, dainty and ripe with life resurrected, life reinvented, life mocked at and life full with more life. There is no inertia, yet there is not sparkling wit. They keep the reader balanced, hardly ever pushed to the limits or challenged to utter harsh truths.

In one story, Female Killers, the writer tells us about one of her female characters: Maybe that's why she opens doors in the mind. Doors, stairwells, pantries. This is how reading feels to the familiar eye, as well- as if opening endless doors into lives and dreams, into yourself and the author alike. The unique sensation is that of touching the inner fibers of the narrative and intruding into the very details that make the human heart. Building and unmaking characters, the intricacy of their inner motions in and out of themselves is trans-lucid in Dorthe Nors' writing as if a magnifying glass were attached to the reader's eyes. Violence, cruelty, compassion, self-doubt, randomness all pile up in-between the pages of a miniature string of stories.

Dorthe Nors is a Danish, promising, introspective writer, author of three novels and two novellas and a welcoming presence in Karate Chop, where sometimes almost nothing happens, yet in such a descriptive manner that gives it more substance than one should find in the fullness of everything.

Tuesday, August 4

A story is time itself, boxed and compressed. It is the briefest entertainment and simulacrum of real life, which is big and messy and requires a strange kind of endurance. The story is stylized for that flash of laughter and pain, thwarted desire and odd consummation, while life waterfalls with it - all of it- every day: prodigious, cloying, in decay. And when the story is finally over - even if the protagonist survives a spray of gunfire and goes on living - it's over. Meanwhile, life carries on, river-swift.

I did some reading, took a test, read some more, asked a professional and it was crystal clear: I have an addictive personality. I shelter my own reward system at the back of my mind. I attach myself to the receptors in my mind where chocolate, for instance, fits like a golden key to the right lock. I used to be a slave to the mighty god of chocolate for years. Always imagined him to be a brown, chocolaty chubby version of Buddha, always ready to gulp some more and save nothing. Once I had three tablets in one day- Lindt was my religion, dopamine my favorite attire. I might be done with it now or simply taking a break. I may be growing out of this addiction into another or simply in the middle of a readjustment period. Either way, I can still appreciate the addiction in some readings, people, or state of minds. The Telling Room reminded me of my dependence on such things as well-flown words, simple, yet intense stories, food at large and as the binder between ancestral energies and the untamed side of us, people. Some books see through you for the weakness there is inside and then you instantly click at the way you mirror back at them.

Part travelogue, part meditation on the meaning of life, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheeseis a journey into the realm of the senses. If you are a foodie or a cheese-monger, make sure you have a plate to nibble on, close to you, so as to deepen the experience. You are bound to take a pause from the munching every now and then to occasionally sigh, frown, melt, dramatize, marvel at. Should you find yourself awkward and restraint, unwilling to exercise all addictive demons, indulge into the feast. This is a book that promises to make you fall for Spain, history, reconnecting with the traditions, simple life and the sacred relation between our food and our bodies. Cheese made with love, recapturing family history, conquers all traveling hearts and bears undying stories. Everything that comes from passion is meant to be immortal, transcending hearts, geography, and roofs of mouths. You are bound to taste the Paramo de Guzman cheese as if it were next to you, in your own bodega, spinning its tale in the telling room of told and untold trials to reach perfection in a bite. It will leave its trace in your mouth as the plot thickens and you will get a glimpse not only at the living clips of the writer who crossed the world because he wanted to believe, but also into a land that breathes history and beauty.

To me, this book speaks of addiction. The way you can grow on a dream and never let it go, regardless of place, time or nature. The simpler the life you lead, the more chance the feeling is inlaid into you, running the veins like the worst of drugs. Alfonso, the cheese maker, has a dream- to show respect to values, tradition and his way of life. He makes cheese to celebrate his father and to help people grasp the meaning of a rustic, unadorned, unpretentious existence. This books sings life in its simplicity. Even for a city boy, may he be a writer, father, husband and Italian proud bearer of his elders' name - Paterniti, the making of dreams knows no boundary or religion, no size, color, or logic. Ambrosio's cheese is soulful because his heart is poured into the making of such queso that swept the world off its feet. Food tells a story, his cheese speaks of his family. Technology constantly kills the dream by processing the love. It raises a wall between the eater and its food. No such sin should come out of a creator's hands. Yet, Ambrosio falls for the trick in the name of love and friendship and technology equals betrayal. In the bigger picture, technology with all its gadgets, keeps us distanced from the authenticity of life. Modern man has forgotten how to take a dump properly and it shows. Ambrosio knows. It takes art and practice.

Addiction also lies in the way the writer becomes mesmerized with a cheese he has never tasted, yet felt drawn to, in a magical way. Layers and layers of narrative pour into the story and the reader becomes actively tangled into this tale of love and treachery in the name of food. The reader is free to take sides and decide what fills his heart. Lessons of friendship, wine, food, silent fields of sunflowers, ruins into the heart and against a blue patch of sky, all bustle into the story and resonate into the reader. Are you accumulating every word into the heart, mind, senses? Are you starting to grow a craving for the mighty cheese, to meet its maker, to walk its lands and share some wine in his telling room? If you do, you are addictive by nature. To beautiful things and to something larger than life that flows through your veins, food memories merely an excuse to give in. To cheese mainly.

Friday, July 24

This is some elegant, crafted writing. This is a woman I would like to meet and have coffee with, while listening to her spin her stories around my heart and mind for hours on end. Azar Nafisi is an Iranian writer and professor, though I am curious which hat she would choose first. My personal view to the matter is that there is a budding writer in disguise inside every serial reader and Mrs. Nafisi is but among the best examples of how love for books met teaching and then, naturally, led to beautifully mastering the written words.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is written as a memoir that reflects upon the teaching years in the university of Tehran between the revolution of 1978-1981 and the following years, until 1997. The author is sacked because she refuses to wear the veil and starts teaching literature to her secret book club, right before the moment of her emigration to USA.

All four chapters of the book - Lolita, Gastby, James, Austen- are but a pretext to share a mutual interest in reading and books, but, most of all, to reflect upon how history, religion, oppression, and totalitarian mindsets touch the very lives of the Iranian people. Students Mahshid, Yassi, Mitra, Nassrin, Azin, Sanaz and Manna help her read between the lines of such incredible stories and discuss the true colors of a villain versus a hero and the thin line between the very two antagonistic concepts. According to the author, villains can easily be blinded by their own lack of empathy towards different manifestations of oppression and dreams we are fed while looking through another's eye. I particularly like how she chooses to describe Nabokov's villain:

"Humbert was a villain," she writes, "because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most."

Freedom comes at some very high price and Nafisi has to either follow the rules of a regime she does not identify with or flee the profession and country that she loves, taking turns in playing the hero and the villain.

I liked the story for the way history and reality became one narrative in the book and how people took turns at identifying with or disapproving of all characters, putting them and their choices to test and trial, in an attempt to verbalize their fears and values. It is authentic and vibrant in its invitation to enter the two worlds that inhabit the book: that of university life under the political regime of the time and into the imaginative realm of such acclaimed writers as Austen, Nabokov, Scott Fitzgerald or James. Also, the idea of shared intimacy among members of the book club who are basically nothing but strangers of the same tastes, is extremely attractive to me. It requires a certain abandonment of the self in search of mirroring otherness through empathy. The seven women of the club enter a magical world revealing their hidden beauty to the eyes of such fortunate authors, whose books come to life in their hands. The reader in the circle and outside, holding this very book, is required to be familiar with the works of the four authors and indulge himself/herself into some criticism of their worlds that live parallel existences beyond geographical boundaries. The personal lives of the seven women find echoes in the books and weave around the core idea idea in the story: we are the choices we make. Reading Lolita in Tehran is the kind of book that wraps the idea of change/choice into the literary foil of an excellent story.

I have been trying a new kind of artistic cocktail lately -mixing books with chocolate flavors and music or associating movies and the feelings they ignite with certain ideas. The reading of this book reminds me of my American days when I would spent my quiet afternoons listening to Tom Waits. Or spending Thursdays at The Flicks, always watching Indies, eating Baked Brie and French Bread at Rick's Cafe. I know, of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, I walked into his...

Friday, July 10

What you give, Momo, is yours for good. What you keep is lost forever.

The unlamented heroes lie at the pit of skin-deep, soft veins running the complicated bodies of everyday mortals. Either this or the other way around, depending on the goggles we choose to wear to look through the very hourglass that measures our greatness. Every now and then, I am caught off guard by the simplicity of a book that reads as if a life of its own were running its pages. It leaves me breathless, all raw, somehow bowing to the whimsical muses.

Mr Ibrahim and the flowers of the Qur'an by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is a book about the unexpected friendship between a 16-year-old Jewish boy, named Moses aka Momo and a 70-year-old Muslim shopkeeper. Even in the Paris of the 1960s, such a story of non-discrimination would be very unlikely to exist. Yet, real life is sometimes much too boring; instead, imagine having Brigitte Bardot coming to your little shop to buy a bottle of water. Rather than asking her for an autograph or taking a selfie with her at your back - thank God selfie sticks are a recent fad- Monsieur Ibrahim overcharges her for the water to make up for the little things Momo, the boy, has stolen from his shop. This is how the friendship is sealed and boy and old man start spending time together until the boy's father suddenly disappears and later on, is found dead. Momo's mother apparently preferred the other son, Popol, a very likeable character that not only won over the mother, but the father as well. Turns out excellent sons are merely a product of a sick imagination.

The Turkish Muslim and the French Jew embark on a journey to Anatolia to help Monsieur Ibrahim reunite with a long-lost friend. It is a time to celebrate his adoption by Monsieur Ibrahim and to be taught essential life lessons. Ce que tu gardes, c'est perdu a jamais! Even love, regardless of its shape and response, must be shared and never buried inside. For once, there is this male version of Cinderella and a godmother that is circumcised and appreciates the hookers. Drunk on parenthood, Monsieur Ibrahim helps Momo live a dream he is not supposed to, out of misery and loneliness into a world that reveals to be tolerant and beautiful. From the red-convertible car to the Dervish ceremony, down the Bosporus ferry and up the little village, where trees are hard to hit against, Momo comes to experience lively hours in the company of his new father and learns much more than any collection of books or the Koran itself could reveal.

It is a book meant to give a softer, kinder image of religious battles and discrimination, almost an idealized version of a harsher truth. It could be a light in a sea of despair or a much too naive manner of rhapsodizing a different, darker reality. I believe you can read it any way you like it- above all, it renders the idea that people can change perceptions and heal other people. Closeness, love, friendship are the medium through which human beings reach a higher level of acceptance and empathy. Contrary to what is expected, this book lacks melodrama and the humor of the story and the way the characters are sketched, make it a crafted tale.

Sunday, July 5

The horror!The horror! are the final words of Kurtz, Joseph Conrad's character, as he breathes his last breath and then, without much apparent connection, except for the exclamation, there are Yunior's words as he quotes Oscar: The beauty! The beauty! One man's terror is another man's praise of the beauty of life, despite the curse hanging over his head and that of an entire family and nation.

The wondrous life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is a book about love. Every now and then, as a reader and a human being, you need to be retaught the lesson of undying love. The perseverance that lies at the pit bottom of our smallness is the driving force that pushes us to fight for the survival of love at all costs.

Oscar de León is a nerd. He lives in a New Jersey suburb with his mother and fabulous sister. He is passionate about science fiction books, dying to know love, ready to conquer a world that eludes him. The narrator Yunior is the opposite -a ladies' man who makes the most of his college years, loves Oscar's sister and struggles to be a writer. The rest of the book is a melange of history, side stories, the mighty fuku - the curse that defines all actions and shapes the fates of all- love tribulations, funky language, humor disguised as seriousness, and then some. It reads very conversational and vivid, a kind of narrative that flows into the reader and buzzes like a neon bulb. Aliveness and authenticity are the key words to the story.

I put a smile on my face while reading and then, made me immerse into the multiple layers of both characters and story lines, only to swim across the interplay in the clash of worlds and personae. Oscar is tricky to define and I got all these mixed emotions about him: pity, tenderness, admiration, hope, frustration. I could hardly make up my mind and keeping me alert is what the book was good at. Beside the story itself, you get a bit of everything: a history lesson on the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic, Spanglish, movies, books, love interrupted, love as a fine cutting blade, love unrequited, love at last - The Beauty! The Beauty!.

It is rich beyond words and the Curse and the Doom of the New World haunts not only characters in this Dominican-American story, but the reader alike. The book is solid funny and there are echoes of other humorous characters in literature like Ignatius Reilly or Samwise Gamgee. It is remarkable how the eternal quest for love and happiness is given a comical, modern attire, family folklore and a shred of magical realism. It is a literary cocktail for the warm-hearted readers that will, at least, get a tingle of sadness at the end of the book. Beauty and ideals are still worth fighting for and heroes are those rising from the mundane and comfortable to escalate their own limitations in their pursuit of happiness. Which according to a lovely French woman in the Hector and the pursuit of happiness movie, it is worth trying to hold!